It’s kinda ironic how Mr. Stallman want us to use this operating system when even them can’t pick one distro (don’t take anything that gnu.org says seriously). Picking a Linux distro has been hard since the beginning of times. Back in the times I was younger, you could only pick Ubuntu or Debian, this is because Arch wasn’t a meme yet so noboby could think they’re cooler than a cooler because they use Arch. In this post I intend to review all the Linux distros I know so maybe a reader can get a conclusion on what distro to use. Never forget that, at the core, all distros all the same, but they do not want you to know that.

Debian is a distribution that has never failed anybody, it has been in this irony layer since 1993, created by this dude Ian Murdock who sadly “killed himself” after posting anti-cop shit in twitter and expressing his reject for systemd.

Debian is a distro that was planed to run on anything and give the less ammounts of problem as possible. For this reason, it is also popular as a server operating system. It uses the apt package manager. Everyobody knows about apt, maybe because they already used debain or used Ubuntu 10.04 and have a vague memory of the “advanced packaging tool”. Now to be honest, i’ve tried a lot of package managers and apt is simply apoteosically slow. There are also alternative frontends to apt like aptitude and synapse.

In the Debian Distribution page you can download many version of the ISO, so you can get the best according to your needs. You can download a minimal netinstall iso that will ask you whether you want to install a graphical interface or not, you can also download a prebuilt iso with the desktop environment you like the most. The thing is that Debian took “freedom” too seriously so the normal isos do not ship with non-free firmware, you can download images that include non-free firmware.

Surely a recommended distro if you don’t mind apt.

Let’s be honest, who uses this besides old men that do not want to use Windows and have no time for learning Linux. This distribution is garbage, a whole encyclopedia could be written on why Ubuntu sucks so much but I’ve got better stuff to do.

I remember that, 5 years ago, I used to be an Arch user, I also remember how much problems it gave to me. To stop calling yourself an “Arch user” is part of growing up. Arch main features are the “AUR” and the rolling release model. “AUR” stands for “Arch User Repository”, this is a place in which users can write their own PKGBUILD scripts which will at the end produce a pacman-compatible package to be installed. The AUR is good to install godforsaken software no one has ever heard of before.

It’s quite comedic, because to install software from AUR, you have to pick one of the following: either you clone a git repo and run a weird command I do not want to remember because I’m not an Arch user or you install an AUR helper, the most popular nowadays is yay, i think. Back in my day it was yaourt. The AUR helpers are not available on any of the official Arch Linux repositories.

Arch claims to be a lightweight linux distro because it doesn’t ship with anything, it doesn’t ship with a desktop environment or anything. Insanely smart people whose parents would be proud of them said that this claim is untrue because Arch Linux uses systemd.

I’m not sure why anyone would use Gentoo over FreeBSD or OpenBSD, the BSD ports system is literally Portage but not written in python and with a friendly interface anyone could use. The main features are the USE flags which is basically global compilations options or something, you can do something similar with FreeBSD and OpenBSD without being a horrible pain. I do not have many experiences with Gentoo and I think every Gentoo user is just coping with the fact that g doesn’t think that his rice is elite enough.

Void is the Linux distribution that I use. It is garbage as well. It uses the “X Binary Package System” (xbps). It began as a try of Linux to mimic OpenBSD, as Void Linux has a preference for doas, and it used to use LibreSSL instead of OpenSSL but they regret this choice and switched back to OpenSSL in Feb 2021. This choice made users mad and some of them (no one) switched to Gentoo to continue using LibreSSL.

xbps is the fastest package manager that i’ve seen in a Linux system, installing packages is something that will be completed in no time under this operating system. Void Linux also uses runit instead of systemd. runit can be a pain in the ass to manage but I’ve written a runit wrapper in perl so you can control it just like you would use systemctl.

Void can also be installed using musl but you gotta be a coping teenager to use musl instead of glibc, in my opinion, if you install an operating system is because you want it to work, not because you want to be fixing stuff all the time.

Despite claiming to be a rolling release distro, the gcc version in the void repos was 10 for the last 2 years. It was updated 3 days ago to version 14. clang is still in version 12 and don’t seem to be updated. On the other hand, Arch has up to date packages.

I already wasted keystrokes talking about this one

Computers were a mistake.